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The Tyranny of the Marginal User

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Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#251

Post by pdonis »

feoren wrote: post #164
bdcs wrote: post #98

The tyranny of the marginal user reminds me of population ethics' The Repugnant Conclusion.[0] This is the conclusion of utilitarianism, where if you have N people each with 10 happiness, well then, it would be better to have 10 N people with 1.1 happiness, or 100 N people with 0.111 happiness, until you have infinite people with barely any happiness. Substitute profit for happiness, and you get the tyranny of the ma…

That conclusion is not repugnant at all, it's just that its phrasing is so simplistic as to be nearly a straw-man. It's a poisoned intuition pump, because it makes you imagine a situation that doesn't follow at all from utilitarianism. First of all, you're imagining dividing happiness among more people, but imagining them all with the same amount of suffering. You're picturing a drudging life where people work all da…

> a situation that doesn't follow at all from utilitarianism

Except that it does according to many utilitarians. That's why it has been a topic of discussion for so long.

> you're imagining dividing happiness among more people, but imagining them all with the same amount of suffering

No. "Utility" includes both positive (happiness) and negative (suffering) contributions. The "utility" numbers that are quoted in the argument are the net utility numbers after all happiness and all suffering have been included.

> You're picturing a drudging life where people work all day and have barely any source of happiness.

Or a life with a lot of happiness but also a lot of suffering, so the net utility is close to zero, because the suffering almost cancels out the happiness. (This is one of the key areas where many if not most people's moral intuitions. including mine, do not match up with utilitarianism: happiness and suffering aren't mere numbers and you can't just blithely have them cancel each other that way.)

> if you can magically divide up some total amount of happiness, why not the same with suffering?

Nothing in the argument contradicts this. The argument is not assuming a specific scenario; it is considering all possible scenarios and finding comparisons between them that follow from utilitiarianism, but do not match up with most people's moral intuitions. It is no answer to the argument to point out that there are other comparisons that don't suffer from this problem; utilitarianism claims to be a universal theory of morality and ethics, so if any possible scenario is a problem for it, then it has a problem.

> you're ignoring the fact that people can create happiness for others

But "can" isn't the same as "will". The repugnant conclusion takes into account the possibility that adding more people might not have this consequence. The whole point is that utilitarianism (or more precisely the Total Utility version of utilitarianism, which is the most common version) says that a world with more people is better even if the happiness per person goes down, possibly way down (depending on how many more people you add), which is not what most people's moral intuitions say.

> It's crazy to think the total amount of happiness to distribute is independent of the world population.

The argument never makes this assumption. You are attacking a straw man. Indeed, in the comparisons cited in the argument, the worlds with more people have more total happiness--just less happiness per person.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#252

Post by Numeral4072 »

mighmi wrote: post #144
com2kid wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran a startup making something similar to this pre-covid, it wasn't just date night, it was "find something to do in under 5 minutes". Groups of 4 to 6, partnering with local businesses who hosted the events. You opened the app, said what you wanted to do and when, and you were automatically put into a group. You could select how many people you already had going with you (date, or just a group of 2 friends who nee…

You weren't able to scale enough initially to be profitable on your own operations, I presume? At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate? This is a fantastic project. I also briefly worked on something similar, but left when I learned more about my coworkers.

I agree the idea seems solid enough, but accommodating the increased complexity of scaling it up sounds quiet difficult. Out of curiosity what did you learn about your coworkers? Something about their motivations for creating such an app or what?

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#253

Post by dragonwriter »

tyre wrote: post #156
bdcs wrote: post #98

The tyranny of the marginal user reminds me of population ethics' The Repugnant Conclusion.[0] This is the conclusion of utilitarianism, where if you have N people each with 10 happiness, well then, it would be better to have 10 N people with 1.1 happiness, or 100 N people with 0.111 happiness, until you have infinite people with barely any happiness. Substitute profit for happiness, and you get the tyranny of the ma…

The Repugnant Conclusion is one of those silly problems in philosophy that don’t make much sense outside of academics. Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness (total and distribution) of an existing population. Merging it with natalism isn’t realistic or meaningful, so we end up with these population morality debates. The happiness of a unconceived possible human is null (not the same as zero!) Comp…

> Utilitarianism ought to be about maximizing the happiness (total and distribution) of an existing population.

That's a somewhat-similar alternative to utilitarianism. Which has its own kind of repugnant conclusions, in part as a result of the same flawed premises: that utililty experienced by different people is a quantity with common objective units that can meaningfully summed, and given that, morality is defined by maximizing that sum across some universe of analysis. It differs from by-the-book utilitarianism in changing the universe of analysis, which changes the precise problems the flawed premises produce, but doesn't really solve anything fundamentally.

> Compare to Rawls’s Original Position, which uses an unborn person to make the hypothetical work but is ultimately about optimizing for happiness in an existing population.

No, its not; the Original Position neither deals with a fixed existing population nor is about optimizing for happiness in the summed-utility sense. Its more about optimizing the risk adjusted distribution of the opportunity for happiness.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#254

Post by WD40forRust »

At risk of an avalanche of knee-jerk downvotes, I will suggest this angle:

'Inclusivity' is in vogue. It's a meme (Dawkins) which is so deep into the psyches of normies today it integrates into everything. Normie is the fish and inclusivity is the water.

What I think is being left on the side lines is 'exclusivity' not in class of product, but in intended customer. "KDE 3.5 is an advanced product, it was not meant for average users like you. Go check out $LATEST_GNOME, it also comes at a more affordable price too!" Sure you're going to turn off some customers, but what you're really saying is "you're not good enough to be within the set of intended users" and I think this dynamic can drive some users into saying "nuh uh I'm not some normie goy, gimmie gimmie gimmie!"

Well that's my shitter thought away, time to flush this turd!

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#256

Post by pdonis »

skybrian wrote: post #249
feoren wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That conclusion is not repugnant at all, it's just that its phrasing is so simplistic as to be nearly a straw-man. It's a poisoned intuition pump, because it makes you imagine a situation that doesn't follow at all from utilitarianism. First of all, you're imagining dividing happiness among more people, but imagining them all with the same amount of suffering. You're picturing a drudging life where people work all da…

Yes, more generally, I’m reminded of David Chapman’s essay, “No Cosmic Meaning” [1]. Thought experiments are a good way to depress yourself if you take them seriously. But I think that utilitarianism has a vague but somewhat related problem in treating “utility” as a one-dimensional quantity that you can add up? There are times when adding things together and doing comparisons makes a kind of sense, but it’s an abstr…

> utilitarianism has a vague but somewhat related problem in treating “utility” as a one-dimensional quantity that you can add up?

Yes, it does. This is one of the most common (and in my view, most compelling) criticisms of utilitarianism.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#258

Post by mrshoe »

The real problem is industry-wide adoption of metrics-driven design.

When I studied cognitive science, the method we employed for HCI was User Centered System Design. Granted, this was a backronym for UCSD, but the point remains — design should be user-centered, not metrics-driven.

When I launch Netflix, it is abundantly clear to me that their design is driven by their metrics. What I want to see at the top is my “continue watching” shows — 99% of the time I just want to watch the next episode of a show that I’m already watching. Instead, they show me row upon row of shows that I have never watched. Their metrics prove to them that getting me hooked on new shows will increase my engagement and increase the amount of time I spend in their app. Guess what? As a user, those are not my goals! Their UI is effectively one big advertisement for Netflix itself. Wonderful.

Unfortunately, virtually all tech companies have accepted metrics-driven design as conventional wisdom at this point. Run an A/B test and see which button treatment performs better, based on the metrics the company cares about — not what the user cares about.

One outlier here is Apple. They do not design based on experiments and metrics. And the Apple TV app does in fact display the shows I am already watching as the top row. Go figure.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#259

Post by olddustytrail »

julianeon wrote: post #205
feoren wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That conclusion is not repugnant at all, it's just that its phrasing is so simplistic as to be nearly a straw-man. It's a poisoned intuition pump, because it makes you imagine a situation that doesn't follow at all from utilitarianism. First of all, you're imagining dividing happiness among more people, but imagining them all with the same amount of suffering. You're picturing a drudging life where people work all da…

Here's a simpler way to phrase the problem. The current world population is about 8 billion. By this argument, and also by your argument, it should actually be 999 billion. Or a number even higher than that. The conclusion boils down to: 1. Find maximum population number earth can support. 2. Hit that number. I do think that, when put this way, it seems simplistic.

Here's an even simpler way to phrase the problem.

The current world population is about 8 billion.

By my argument it should be 2 billion.

Your argument is therefore rather foolish.

Re: The Tyranny of the Marginal User

#260

Post by greiskul »

skybrian wrote: post #249
feoren wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That conclusion is not repugnant at all, it's just that its phrasing is so simplistic as to be nearly a straw-man. It's a poisoned intuition pump, because it makes you imagine a situation that doesn't follow at all from utilitarianism. First of all, you're imagining dividing happiness among more people, but imagining them all with the same amount of suffering. You're picturing a drudging life where people work all da…

Yes, more generally, I’m reminded of David Chapman’s essay, “No Cosmic Meaning” [1]. Thought experiments are a good way to depress yourself if you take them seriously. But I think that utilitarianism has a vague but somewhat related problem in treating “utility” as a one-dimensional quantity that you can add up? There are times when adding things together and doing comparisons makes a kind of sense, but it’s an abstr…

The big problem with utilitarinism, is that people think that a preference function for the utilitariam that is creating a given world is something simple. Then some people are like, no, it's more complex, we need to take into account X, Y and Z. But the truth is, no human being is capable of defining a good utility function, even for ourselves. We don't know all the parameters, and we don't know how to combine those parameters to add them up. So I would say that formal, proper utilitarinism, is not a metaphor for math: it is math. But is right now in the area of non constructive math.

Maybe our descedants will elevate it outside of that with computers someday. Cause the human brain with just pieces of papers and text, probably cannot do it.

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